Just read Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk. It was timely for me because Brian Marick’s mention of the New Math put me in auto-rant mode on how schools optimize for students who are unlikely to excel in the subjects they are being taught.

One of the themes of Alan Kay’s sparkling career has been to try to make computers accessible to children as a learning tool and his history is full of little anecdotes about how he would teach Smalltalk to twelve year-olds and they would spontaneously invent stuff.

What was so wonderful about this idea were the myriad of children’s projects that could spring off the humble boxes. And some of the earliest were tools! This was when we got really excited. For example, Marion Goldeen’s (12 yrs old) painting system was a full-fledged tool. A few yuears later, so was Susan Hamet’s (12 yrs old) OOP illustration system (with a design that was like the MacDraw to come). Two more were Bruce Horn’s (15 yrs old) music score capture system and Steve Ptz’s (15 yrs old) circuit design system. Looking back, this could be called another example in computer science of the “early success syndrome.”

I get the impression though that Kay thought of this as a failure as he was looking to revolutionize education as a whole rather than train the next generation of super-geniuses (like himself).

The successes were real, but they weren’t as general as we thought. They wouldn’t extend into the future as stringly as we hoped. The children were chosen from the Palo Alto schools (hardly an average background) and we tended to be much more excited about the successes than the difficulties. In part, that we were seeing was the “hack phenomenon,” that, for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural.

I wonder how he feels now when he looks back?

He, along with his team at Parc, invented a huge chunk of the technology that has made modern computing successful.  But computers have still not had much impact on the way kids are taught. When they are not used as glorified textbooks, they are used to teach PowerPoint skills and word-processing.

I wonder if he would have had more success if he had optimized for the kids who are excited about computers? The sweet spot for his glorious Squeak still seems to be kids who find joy in creating and exploring. I wonder what would have happened if he had stuck with that 5% who jumped in naturally instead of trying to satisfy a broader audience? (If someone runs into him, can you ask him for me?)

The rest of Kay’s paper is well worth a read. It’s inspirational despite its underlying theme of if only they had listened to us. He was telling his bosses at Xerox in 1971 that

In the 1990’s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflective display.s, wigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks.

The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era, although most of the machines will be given away by manufacturers who will be marketing the content rather than the container of personal computing.

He talks a lot about education and about constructionist ideas and about how schools didn’t teach real world skills.

The general topic was education and it was the first time I heard Marvin Minsky speak. He put forth a terrific diatribe against traditional education methods, and from him I heard the ideas of Piaget and Papert for the first time. Marvin’s talk was about how we think about complex situations and why schools are really bad places to learn these skills. He didn’t have to make any claims about computer+kids to make his point. It was clear that education and learning had to be rethought in the light of 20th century cognitive psychology and how good thinkers really think.

He ends on a sad note

When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one’s designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth–otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

Not sure whether he is advocating that we compare our efforts with the entire history of human art and become inevitably dissatisfied or to go ahead and compare and be happy anyway.

I had this article published in Better Software a few years ago and it has been sitting over at Developer Testing since then.

I am giving it a new home here in case Developer Testing goes away. Who knows? Maybe it will bring a whole new audience to automated software testing?

My boss is stepping up the campaign for better quality in the software industry:

If you have ever wished that you had your own web site hosted by the same people who host www.raggedclown.com, I have a special offer just for you…

First a few words about DreamHost and how I chose them.

1. Every previous web hosting service that I have ever used ended up being bought by Verio who got bought by NTT who decided that my hosting service would be so much better (for them) if they made it suck. So far, that hasn’t happened to Dreamhost. For me, the primary requirement for a web hosting company is that it not get bought by Verio. Verio sucks.
2. It doesn’t cost too much. My account costs me something like $100 per year which gives me (essentially) unlimited email, domains, sub-domains, POP accounts and so much bandwidth and disk space that I have never even bothered to find out how much. There are no additional costs for hosting additional domains (the registration fee for new domains is, like, $20 or something).
3. They have good support. So far I have had only one problem and they fixed it within about 3 seconds of me noticing it. I had some questions when I first opened my account and they answered them immediately to my entire satisfaction (unlike Verio who have yet to answer my question from 1998).
4. They have a ton of software to play with. Here’s a smattering of what they offer:
   • Wordpress
   • Ruby on Rails
   • Python
   • Subversion
   • A Jabber server
   • Media streaming (like QuickTime and RealAudio)
   • PERL
   • PHP
   • MYSQL
   • JOOMLA
   • Some shopping cart thingie
   • Some polling thingie
   • CRON
   • Shell access

   plus all the usual POP, IMAP, FTP, web mail and all that stuff - all set up with their fancy One-Click installer. You also have control over all the DNS configuration.

If all that weren’t enough to persuade you, Dream Host has this promotion scheme whereby you con your friends into getting an account and they give you a $97 referral fee which you use towards your own account fees or give to your friend as a discount or split in any proportion you may choose.

If you’d like to take advantage of all this goodness - and a $50 discount - go sign up now and tell’em “The Clown sent me”. Just click on the big banner on your right or the funnier one just down there and enter the promo code “CHASINGREWARDS50″.
.

Dreamhost. It doesn’t suck. It hasn’t been bought by Verio.

No regrets! Well, of course I dream of what I might have done differently and better, but seriously, who am I to second-guess, say, 1984 vintage Bjarne? He may have been less experienced than I, but he was no less smart, probably smarter, and he had a better understanding of the word of 1984 than I have.

Bjarne Stroustrup

I used Microsoft Movie Maker for my second video. I fully expected it to suck. What I hadn’t anticipated was how badly it would suck.

It’s hard to imagine a video editor program that would suck more than Microsoft Movie Maker and, unless there is a free(ish) video editor that is much better (and doesn’t require me to buy a mac), the wait for my third video will be rather long.

So don’t expect to see Dylan’s guitar recital on YouTube any time soon.

A couple of years ago, I set out to do an experiment very similar to this one.

The scientists then put the robots in a little arena with two glowing red disks. One disk they called the food source. The other was the poison source. The only difference between them was that food source sat on top of a gray piece of paper, and the poison source sat on top of black paper. A robot could tell the difference between the two only once it was close enough to a source to use its infrared sensor to see the paper color.

Then the scientists allowed the robots to evolve. The robots–a thousand of them in each trial of the experiment–started out with neural networks that were wired at random. They were placed in groups of ten in arenas with poison and food, and they all wandered in a haze. If a robot happened to reach the food and detected the gray paper, the scientists awarded it a point. If it ended up by the poison source, it lost a point. The scientists observed each robot over the course of ten minutes and added up all their points during that time.

Never finished it, sadly. One day I will.
Be sure to watch the cool video of the cooperating robots.

I don’t know how many times I’ve had that discussion where the person on the other side of the debate thinks that all video games are about killing space aliens. OK. I do know how many. It’s a lot.

Most of those people - a few of Dylan’s teachers, for example, not to mention many of his friends’ parents - have no idea that games as rich as Age of Empires or Ultima Online or Rome:Total War exist. As a result, when they do let their kids near a video game, they are stuck with rubbish like Super Smash Brothers because their tastes never evolve to anything more sophisticated. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To be sure, massive and complex games have their own risks as we we discovered when we almost lost Dylan inside Runescape a couple of years ago. Expecting a ten year old to have the social skills to interact with hundreds of other players in an imaginary world or to have the economic skills run a trading business or to have the leadership skills to coordinate a team of adventurers battling a ferocious monster…well, we just expected too much of him. But one day he will have those skills. One day he will run a lead a raiding party in an imaginary world or start a successful business in a virtual economy or devise a strategy to defeat the toughest of dragons. One day - but not yet. He has to prepare for that day.

Many parents are down on video games because they think of them as mostly just mindless button pushing. The opposite is true. The real danger is that the best video games are too sophisticated for an impressionable young mind to handle. Certainly more sophisticated than any TV show their parents ever sat in front of.

So, it’s nice to finally, after thirty-something years, start reading positive articles about video games in the mainstream press. Sure, most of the articles are still about the dangers of seeing someone’s pixelated bottom in Grand Theft Auto but that’s why the rare few positive articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal are such a pleasant change.

One the best articles I have read in a while, though, is this one at Huffinton Post entitled Why Your Kids Should Play More Video Games. Imagine being the mother who tries to prevent her teenage son from learning Shakespeare so that he can get ahead in a baseball game:

Last week my son raced past me on the stairs just as I was coming up to tell him, as usual, to turn off the TV.
“I gotta find out what was Shakespeare’s most popular comedy,” he called out, by way of explanation.
“Is this for homework?”
“No. My player is writing his exams. If he fails he’ll be cut from the team.”

and then tries to forbid him from studying for that exam. If you are smart you will imagine yourself saying, like she did:

His eyes dart to the screen. “Can I just finish writing my exam?”
I check my watch. “Dinner’s going to be a little while. Why don’t you play some more?”

I just tried Sage - a Firefox extension for reading RSS feeds. It’s very beautiful - like an ornate teapot made of chocolate.

Unfortunately it looks like no one ever actually considered using it for, like, reading RSS feeds. There is no way to hide the stuff you have already read. You can mark it read but that doesn’t make it go away.

UNINSTALL